Best of ESMO is a Lie

The legendary Greek physician Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, once said that desperate times calls for desperate measures. He may have been referring to incurable diseases more than a thousand years ago, but it seems that Jin-Yang Gon may be unwittingly applying that same principle today to his company.

HLB has launched into an aggressive defense of its practices and operations, threatening to sue people like us for pointing out the problems in his company. But the bluster is nothing more than just that – a pack of lies designed to further mislead investors and the wider public what he already knows is patently false.

Here’s one simple example of a lie that he has consistently perpetuated.

In HLB’s celebration of the drug trial ANGEL’s presentation at European Society For Medical Oncology (ESMO) earlier this year, the company has said on two occasions here and here that Angel received the “Best of ESMO” award.

We were particularly troubled by this given what we knew of the failure of the trial. So we did what any interested party would do and wrote to ESMO’s press office about this so-called ‘award’.

Here’s the official response.

Thank you for your inquiry.

Please be informed that the ANGEL trial was not recognised with any official award during the ESMO Congress.

The ANGEL trial, like others, was included in the Congress Highlights session on Tuesday at the discretion of the chair of the track to which the abstract was originally allocated.

The Congress Highlights session is mainly aimed at summarising some of the interesting results presented over the four Congress days, without any explicit or implicit recognition from ESMO.

We regret any inconvenience caused by a misinterpretation of facts as reported in the press release here (news).

Thank you for your understanding.

Best wishes,

Louise Troeng

ESMO Press Office

T: +41 (0)91 973 55 96

European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)

Via Ginevra, 4 | 6900 Lugano | Switzerland

Please do write in to verify this email – you will get the same reply.

We openly like to call the Korean Stock Exchange regulator to take action.

Here’s the thing – if the company can so blatantly lie about an award it didn’t receive what else is it hiding?

The company has also come out to defend Hengrui’s early success with the drug, hoping to ride on its apparent success for a global rollout. Simply put, the company’s future prospects has nothing to do with Hengrui’s past record.

HLB does not stand to gain from it and that was during a time when there were no other alternatives in the market. With the advancement of other better drugs such as the Cyramza and the Keytruda available today, the chances of getting Riveroceranib approved by the FDA approved is next to nothing.

The tactics are clear – all of this is to buy time for Jin-Yang Gon. His goal is to pad the company up, sell out before the truth hits home. He also lashed out at any efforts to release information on the pre-NDA meeting, stating that those are secrets to the drug’s success.

In all likelihood, he is aiming to keep the cat in the bag for as long as he can. In other words, he wants to do a Schrodinger’s cat. Schrodinger, a physicist, put forward the idea of a thought experiment. A cat, which is subject to an experiment that could kill it, is placed in a sealed box. But no one know whether it is dead or alive until the box is opened. In a way, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time while the box is sealed, a paradox in scientific theory.

Currently, as it stands, the company may still decide not to disclose its pre-NDA meeting minutes and still go ahead with the formal FDA application in April 2020, even though they know the chances are slim. The formal decision of the FDA will only be disclosed 6 months after, or Q4 2020, likened to the opening of the box, to find out that the cat is dead.

Jin-Yang Gon is likely not to be around when that happens. Will you be the one to find out that the company has become rotten from the inside out?